Echo in an Open Field

Xidelstat is a territory of Jord. It is bordered by five states, not including its mother-state: Samir to the north; Yorkley to the east; Farilos to the southeast; Kadesh to the south; and Barisma to the southwest. The flat steppe area that came to be Xidelstat was uninhabited and for the most part undisturbed. Some oil company from Jord ventured into the unforgiving landscape and actually struck oil north of where the future territory’s capital would be. Having discovered such a treasure, the company sent a team of lawyers up to the national capital of F.D. Porto-Maro to request this federal land be sold or given over to Jord for the cultivating and refining of oil.

The national Agricultural Committee sent out a surveyor to determine where this unnamed territory would begin and end, and the deed to the land was sold to Jord for a five percent cut on the profit made from the oil each year. The territory was named after Franklin Xidelstat, the foreman of the team from the oil company that had struck the liquid gold.

Over the years, people from all the eight states brought their families to Xidelstat and created families there. Towns began to crop up and eventually cities were born from the influx of people, mostly oil workers and their families. Eventually Xidelstat developed its own micro-government, and although it was the pride of the Jordans, the capital Kitam was much too far away for them to keep a reign on the developing state-that-could-be.

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Xidelstat’s principal cities are Sarabi, the capital, Quentin Town, and Feolus. They are each just miles away from an oil refinery or well, where most of the men of the cities worked. Sarabi became the territory’s industrial center, with warehouses and headquarters of such companies as the Borenir Corporation, the most successful company in all of Zuria. A railway station was built in Sarabi—aptly named Central Hub Rail Station—and the trains which run between Sarabi, Quentin Town, and City West in Yorkley, branched out into smaller towns like Uríth, Feolus, and a few in Jord where the steppe ebbed away. The Warehouse District and what became known as the Housing District were joined when the roads expanded, and soon the Public and Business Districts joined them at the intersection of Q-Town Road and Great Lady Main Street.

Sarabi and Quentin Town are the only cities in Xidelstat with public libraries. Quentin Town, however, is the only place in Xidelstat with a university. Zed University has been the birthplace of hundreds of profitable lawyering careers; these men and women usually go to work in the Federal District of Port-Maro or Yorkley. Doctors and engineers are also turned out  at Zed, though higher education is not a requirement for much else; and the principal business of the territory being oil drilling and refining, there is little use for much education in Xidelstat at all. Quentin Town is the home of work seminars and big corporate meetings because of the Quentin Auditorium, which is also a theater that houses local productions that people come from miles around to watch.

The town of Feolus is small, with an almost rural atmosphere. It has one manufacturing plant, where locals work with porcelain and glass. They make fine china, bath tubs, sinks, windows, mirrors, and glassware. There are even a few privately owned glass-blowing shops where the owners make glass figures and stained-glass hangers and windows (for a hefty price, most of them). Most of the wares from the plant are shipped in wagons to Sarabi, packed onto trains and sent to department stores across Zuria. Most people in Xidelstat, however, buy these things (for cheaper, in fact) straight from the plant, and so there are few department stores in the territory.

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It took generations for the people of Xidelstat to consider themselves Xidelians, instead of the Farilons, Kadeshians, Barismans, ‘Delans, Hadians, Yorkers, Jordans, and Samiros/-as that their predecessors had been. When Xidelstat threatened to appeal to the national government for their independence, its power- and money-hungry neighbors Barisma and Kadesh brought their militaries in to Xidelstats’ borders and, without intervention from the mother-state that was ignorant of its territory’s situation, the two states fought for the right to overtake the territory and claim it for its own.

The war that rocks Xidelstat lasts 2½ years. The first period of the war, Barisma and Kadesh battle at the border, where even the Xidelians are unaware that there is a war. The second period, called Il Scåthan, or Krój Duży in the vernacular, sees the two armies going deeper into Xidelstat, eventually overtaking Sarabi and beginning to rip it apart. The armies also begin to take civilians and force them to fight among their ranks, as they’re cut off from their supplies and the rest of their men by the opposing army at their borders.

Something merciful happens after those two and a half years: the plainclothes militia from Samir has come, and although there are soldiers left from Barisma and Kadesh meant to kill any remaining draftees, for the most part there is peace. The national government eventually sends aid to the territory, including architects to rebuild Sarabi and rations and things. Luckily, outside of Sarabi there is little structural damage, although many Xidelians had disappeared and would never be found again. The government also granted Xidelstat its statehood (despite Jord’s assertion that they had no right to do it) and protection by the militia until Xidelstat could muster up its own forces. Barisma and Kadesh were sanctioned and in some cases embargoed, and many of their militaries’ officers were arrested and would be tried for war crimes. A few more years would go by before the draftees who were herded back into Barisma and Kadesh—or, those who survived—were discovered in the prisons and labor camps and freed by the newly-formed Xidelian Army.

Hub City is a decently sized city  accessible only through wormholes. These portals were created at true north, east, south, and west in the city and in various places throughout the inhabited universe, and are kept in buildings called portal houses. The land on which the city itself sits is an asteroid with an artificial atmosphere, out at the hem of the universe. It is far from any sun and has no moon, and so has an artificial cycle of night and day. Likewise, without a natural rotation, the Hub’s seasons are mathematical and consistent. Spring and autumn were programmed to last the longest, winter the shortest and summer somewhere in the middle for a restful break from school and the chill. The man-made atmosphere does not, however, hinder the use of magic or in any way disrupt its courses like some atmospheres of its kind do—except from the outside.

The portal houses at the Hub are much like medium-sized mansions. They have three stories and contain at least twelve portals per floor (except the Corporate Sector’s, which also has two large portals that are designed for earth-vehicles and air-buses. These are built into an additional basement. The vehicles come up on the road via a ramp. This is also the bus garage during off-hours and holidays). They have elegant stairways and a moderately large cafeteria for hungry travelers. The ticket booths are on the first floor first thing through the front door, and checkers take stubs when you get in a portal to your destination. The amenities at the portal houses include free air-buses that circulate between them at thirty-minute intervals, as well as illusion machines that can make an otherwise-shaped man or woman look like the race of their choice for twenty-four hours.

From the portal houses, transportation in the Hub include earth-vehicles and air-buses. There are also bike shops, including regular bicycles and motorcycles, and stores where one can buy transportation of a less mundane kind: magic carpets and hovercycles and things of that sort. One shop, aptly named Up, Up, And Away! is a boutique specializing in flying broomsticks and the less primitive flying metal pole. All stores of this sort are near Central Square.

Upon entering the aptly-named Hub City from the west portal house, Ephrath, your eyes are greeted by the dilapidation of the slums, often referred to as “the broken spoke.” Here the houses are ramshackle and weathered, their paint, mostly white, chipping and peeling from the buildings’ wooden flesh. The road is paved roughly but it is ill-advised to walk; if your clothing looks new it may be stripped from you without hesitation by any man or woman who espies you wearing them. In the Brokenspoke, there are no vehicles but the buses that service the portal houses. They run every fifteen minutes through Central Square.

From the south portal house, named Nakimera, you enter the corporate district. Here the big businesses house their headquarters in high skyscrapers. The large manufacturers also have some warehouses in this district, though these days they are few and far between. Likewise a few banks have established themselves here, those for the rich—usually the corporate big shots who can afford the high checking fees. The most expensive bank in Hub City stands at the southeastern-most end of the Corporate Sector: Il Banco Bellaggio.

The streets in the Corporate Sector are neatly paved and delineated. Vehicles are packed in the garage down the street from the Bellaggio, and the portal buses don’t cross the intersection that separates them. The Corporate Sector portal is the only one large enough for earth-vehicles. The Corporate Sector is also the only section of Hub City where public magic is prohibited, and which has a wall to guard against the inhabitants and plant life of the forest.

Waldron, the east portal house, faces the east-west main street that ends as Kassi Row. All of Hub City’s most expensive real estate is on the Row, including the home of the mayor.  On the roads parallel to it are the more modest homes and apartments. Kassi Row becomes Portal Road EW (Waldron-Ephrath) five miles before it feeds into the roundabout at Central Square.

Of all the Hub’s portal houses, the north portal, Sulwyn, is the busiest. The northern portion of the city is called the “social sector,” where residents and outsiders alike gather after their working hours. The most notable establishments here are the Moving Picture Theater, Katya’s Gentlemen’s House, and the Common Grounds (the biggest bar in town, but by no means the only one). The theater sits between Katya’s and the Common Grounds, all of which are across Little Main Road from the long Markethouse. On one side of the Markethouse is the Office of the Law, and on the other is the Hub City Holding gaol.

Across Portal Road NS (Sulwyn-Nakimera) are other, lesser-known bordellos, bars, and live show theaters. Here on the west side are the hotels, motels, what-have-you, and overnight stay whorehouses (you can’t spend the night at Katya’s—you have to take them back to your place for that). There are fewer fireball lamps to light the streets anywhere far from the Moving Picture.

Central Square, often referred to as “the hub of the Hub,” is where most business takes place. Here are the smithies, mechanic shops, potions sellers, technology gurus, and the Grand Cathedral. The centerpiece of the Square is a giant fountain surrounded by the traffic roundabout. The fountain is made of amethyst and may weigh at least a ton. Here at Central Square magic is not only condoned but encouraged. Local children take school in the cathedral and come out at lunchtime to watch the magical displays and try their own hands at what they might do if they only had a little more experience.

Wandering peddlers and performers are required to obtain a license before putting their wares out on the Square. Anyone caught without such permit may find him- or herself in the goal for a few days. Sellers of pets, such as small dragons, dogs, cats, and birds are required to have special licenses and undergo a safety inspection.

Outside the city limits there is the Golmring Forest. Here there are wild creatures, most harmless but some fairly dangerous. Also this is where the werefolk, vampires, and other carnivorous residents and wanderers hunt.

The inhabitants of Hub City are as diverse as the locations to which the portals go. They are tradespeople, businesspeople, stay-at-home parents, drunks, thieves, and magicians. In race there are humans, elves, vampires (some of whom live very honest, nonviolent lifestyles), were-creatures, shapeshifters, fairies, the occasional demons and angels, and goblins—to name a few. The current mayor himself is a centaur, and the sheriff is a shapeshifter (this is often a point of contention between the denizens of the Hub. Some say there’s a racial bias against other races being the heads of the law).

Hub City is a place where powerful magicians can make their homesteads. Since magic and psychic “waves” are diffused by the atmosphere, it is a safe place for them to teach their children and train their apprentices have they any. The Hub is also friendly toward magical practices; the only place that “public displays of magic” are prohibited is the Corporate Sector. In the middle of Central Square, however, the fountain bubbles with psychical energy that enhances the strength of magical endeavors.

Area Map